John Niedermeyer is a Brooklyn-based design manager and internets enthusiast at <a href="http://buzzfeed.com">BuzzFeed</a>. Previously, he was a digital designer and editor at <a href="http://nytimes.com">The New York Times</a>.

When I’m design­ing and build­ing a web­site, I dread the point where I’ll have to shift from work­ing local­ly, to work­ing on the serv­er. Once the ini­tial lay­out and CSS is done, it’s time to start script­ing with PHP, and pulling con­tent in from MySQL data­bas­es — and time to fire up ye olde FTP. This con­stant upload­ing is frus­trat­ing, and gives me carpal tun­nel…

I’ve always known that it was pos­si­ble to set up PHP & MySQL local­ly, as Mac OSX has the Apache web serv­er built-in… but, that always seemed like such a has­sle. After a few min­utes of tin­ker­ing, I’d throw my hands up and think, wouldn’t it be help­ful if some­one put togeth­er an easy install pack­age?

MAMP installs a local serv­er envi­ron­ment in a mat­ter of sec­onds on your Mac OS X com­put­er, be it Power­Book or iMac. Like sim­i­lar pack­ages from the Win­dows- and Lin­ux-world, MAMP comes free of charge.

This should speed things up con­sid­er­ably, and allow me to work with­out an inter­net con­nec­tion… on the plane, in the park, etc.

1 Response to “MAMP: Mac, Apache, Mysql &PHP”

I’ve got the same set­up run­ning on my Power­book, and it’s great. A lot of the cof­fee shops and cafes around here don’t offer wire­less access (if they do, it’s rid­cu­lous­ly expen­sive), so hav­ing this set­up allows me to spend my Sat­ur­day morn­ings, while the mis­sus is at work, enjoy­ing some great cof­fee and work­ing away on var­i­ous projects. Very con­ve­nient.